Future of Quartz Composer

iason's picture

quartz composer didnt change much in the last couple of years and im wondering if apple has any interest in updating it. some years ago there were even quartz-composer sessions at wwdc. then somehow nobody at apple cared about it anymore, perhaps IOS was too dominant. hearing that apple hired C.Wright in 2010 raised my expectations but 2 years later i am not sure if this will have any influence on quartz composer.

what do you think about the future of quartz composer?

mradcliffe's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer




Please avoid any unsubstantiated claims when discussing this topic. Have fun.

psonice's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I see it like this: A few years back QC was this awesome, but maybe 'unfinished' (i.e. not all it could be) tool for doing amazing UI design and the like. It was a fantastic dev tool, and brilliant for doing interactive animations in apps, video processing, and a bunch more. In other words it was a really good dev tool.

Then... we got 3D, shadows, openCL that never really worked well enough for serious use... and it became more of a fun toy for doing VJ-type stuff, and less of a dev tool.

I can't see why apple would want to spend time + money on a free VJ tool. They get very little of value back from the effort. I can see why they'd want to develop QC as a serious dev tool though - especially if they port it to iOS. So I guess it depends on whether they see the value there, and how it fits in with the rest of their plans for their dev tools.

franz's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

the future looks uncertain, at least for me. Instead of opening up the official API (like allowing to make macros, documenting the mesh port .. etc), AAPL kept adding inconsistent features (face detection anyone ?) and breaking working features.

Today any serious QC user just cannot use it under Lion (!). We'll see next month with the official release of Mountain Lion, but if things don't get any better with the freshest OS, one could seriously consider dropping QC to something else.

Alas, when considering visual applications prototyping efficiency, I don't see anything near the power of QC, at least on the Mac platform.

Sad but true story.

harrisonpault's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

Yup, I pretty much agress.

Quartz Composer is (like many Apple software products) an acquisition, not a home-grown project. It provides a unique set of tools for access to CoreImage, OpenGL, OpenCL, and JavaScript in a sweet graph-oriented patch environment. In it's earlier days, I believe (unsubstantiated speculation), it was a valuable tool inside Apple for exploring these capabilities, especially since they can be heterogeneously connected with little bezier curves.

There are a number of longer term issues with this tool for Apple. 1. As tools for the support of OpenGL and OpenCL mature, the cute little patches inside Quartz Composer's editor become less compelling because there are more sophisticated tools to work with them. 2. As shader programmers become more comfortable with the paradigms and create more sophisticated works, the languages develop, and the hardware support for graphics constantly evolves, it is a harder problem to keep the QC tool current. 3. As it falls behind, it becomes less interesting for the increasing population of shader developers. I wonder, does the core architecture of Quartz Composer (written outside of Apple) scale and adapt to this changing hardware and developer world?

The current appeal of Quartz Composer to the performance/VJ population is a function of it's broad collection of tools. Want to connect a MIDI device, an OSC device, an HID device, a cool generative graphics shader, two live cameras, a Twitter feed, DMX lighting desk and 3 projectors for a live performance? QC can do that for you without even touching C-code, GLSL, or network programming. It may not do any of these things as well as the special tools, but the collection remains impressive. What other constituency needs to patch everything under the sun together?

It is always frustrating to try to read the Apple tea leaves. Apple hires cwright. QC is seriously broken with each new OS release. The Mac Pro update this week is a joke; but Cook promises something better next year. cwright helps out with crash reports, threading issues, and such on the QC dev list. He evangelizes about GCD and blogs about low level memory management in the Mach Kernal. Quartz becomes an optional part of the Xcode download. Who knows where this is going.

My own optimistic theory is that there is hard re-architecting work going on inside Apple related to the whole future of gpu oriented tools. You can't make the QC OpenCL patch work with newer language variants and you can't make Quicktime work with new codecs, high def pixel counts and streaming if the core architecture is fundamentally limited. Then there is the macro-trend at Apple towards homogeneity of tools across the iOS/OSX duopoly. The hardware ground is shifting pretty rapidly here. I predict something good will emerge at some time. But whether it will be the Swiss Army knife of QC or not is a very open question. Meanwhile, I concur with the generally expressed consensus around here that the software as delivered to us is not getting a lot of love right now.

blackburst's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

"The current appeal of Quartz Composer to the performance/VJ population is a function of it's broad collection of tools" This is certainly true, but I think there's more to it. I use VDMX and QC, a holy matrimony. A customizable GUI and performance front end to a stupidly flexible graphical programming environment. I can trigger QC clips as if they're videos, with live control over parameters, I can patch up my own video fx for use in vdmx, I can even make "plugins" to treat data however I want and all with a gui. This combination really is something that is not available elsewhere to my knowledge, although other vj apps can play .qtz animations and fx. Where will this leave these developers if Qc disappears? They've built a lot of infrastructure around QC support, to a point where massive chunks of their functionality/appeal rely on QC. Even if I ask the same question but not rhetorically, really how can these tools continue to function, what similar frameworks would offer such functionality? Surely the developers of such reliant apps have considered what they/we will move onto once qc is gone.

cybero's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

Quote:
Today any serious QC user just cannot use it under Lion (!).

Lion is underwhelming, however, I don't entirely agree, just about every vimeo video I've posted during the past eight months has been composed and rendered in Lion QC.

That said, there's been quite a few fallbacks to Snow QC during this time for one composition or another, especially if requiring stock patch Video input.

For any supportable rig or installation Snow or earlier is currently preferred.

Some aspects of Lion are welcome in QC though, especially the discernible improvements in processing speeds for OpenCL compositions.

That tends to point hopefully towards Mountain Lion being a source of further improvements, but I'm not holding my breath about it.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I know I've hammered about bugs at times, but maybe the other side of it is that for what Apple uses QC for, it's largely insignificant.

The editor is sluggish, and probably not usable for live performance, but if you look at the qtz's in an app like photobooth, there are 3~6 patches more or less. Image->filter->output stuff, maybe with a movie player, a sample&hold, and some compositing.

Even when I've taken large compositions that were made in the SL editor (or even Leopard era stuff), and use it as a resource for an application outside of the QC Editor, all is well, though they may be horrible when running in the Lion editor. I'm not finding performance problems as QuartzComposer framework issues, as much as QuartzComposer.app issues.

Of course there are some bugs with some patches that are pretty well vetted out at this point. Yet, I doubt that any department at Apple is up in arms about Interaction patch being broken; does any production app use it? I think issues with OpenCL and Mesh Creator stuff fall in a similar boat.

The concept of using graph transversal to setup relationships of nodes, especially for graphics stuff, is fairly well established and it's the one Apple has right now. QC's here for 10.8, and at least a couple things I tested out were fixed, and I've heard about a couple other things I haven't tested out myself that are apparently fixed as well...tentatively. If there's some kind of big conglomeration of the operating systems, and things shift away from QC being viable on the platform, then I'd at least hope it would be deprecated for an OS iteration (10.9/11?).

The other thing I'd point out is that, now, there is no Developer install with all of the "good stuff". There's Xcode with other stuff optional. At that, many Xcode users have complaints similar to QC users. I don't think it's a QC thing, I think it's a time of change at Apple... with all of the pushes for unification of the way devices work together, implementation of better security systems, etc., there are probably bigger priorities in getting that stuff working OK at the moment.

If I was going to pick one classic "problem" with QC, that I think is the biggest negative impact, was the creation of two separate plugin frameworks, the internal, and the public. Uh, to pick another, it would be the seeming lack of any thought being put into place to allow newer compositions to run Core Profile OpenGL and the currently really sluggish editor.

As far as "what if there wasn't a QC", it would probably just amount to more time spent using only Xcode. Aside from that, I like the concept of OFXComposer, because it takes in video streams and texture, lets you process the textures with fragment shaders, and render to output, and has the OFX user base. Though that's way limited compared to QC, there quite a bit than can be done with it. OFX itself is very useful as far as the wealth of addons, and Cinder is a nice system too. Neither node based, but helpful for doing graphics/interactive based stuff.

There are always systems like MaxMSP, and VVVV (Win...gasp), and ThreeNodes.js is also pretty promising - I recently tested the ability to use ThreeNodes like a server, and it's kinda wild to have different computers playing the visual output of something like that in the web-browser windows. It was snappy too. However... QC is still way better for my uses right now, regardless of any bugs it has, that I'm finding to be still pretty work-aroundable.

I'd personally like to see a node system without as many layers of abstraction and undocumented mystery. Ideas like QuartzBuilder were also pretty cool. It would be interesting to see a node system that's a legit IDE, maybe with some extra IB like stuff. Who knows.

cybero's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I think the recently announce change to the OSX update schedule could be a significant factor that will have ramifications to both OS and applications.

psonice's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I've been using it under lion regularly since lion was released. Not had any issues at all really, unless there were some in the early days I'm failing to remember. But then I've mostly used it for dev stuff, where it's pretty reliable. That and writing crazy shaders :)

jd's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

Just to add to the total comments, I for one am deliriously happy that I have QC, it has allowed me to build the apps that I have always wanted to, despite the fact that I don't have a knack for traditional line-by line programming. (also I am a very crappy speller).

I will be very sad if it goes away, because this kind of interface and way of programming makes perfect sense to my very visual brain. Long live QC!!! (I hope)

The alternatives to this style of programming seems to be vvvv (no for mac) and Max/Jitter (quite-kewl, but doesn't gel with me and have spent several 30 day demos trying to do what I can do in 30 minutes in QC)

What I personally would love to see in the long-term for QC is a way to patch it/build it/test it in QC, then run it thru some trans-mogrify process into IOS code. (that's not too big of a feature request is it? ;)

jd

cwilms's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I do agree there are some very big changes happening at Apple right now, changes that affect things like what products are presented at WWDC and feedback about what's next for tools like QC. I don't think reading to much into it is very beneficial, Apple has never been one to announce where it's going with products or services, they've always been very much on their own clock; after all speculation can be as good for business as anticipation.

I started using QC a year ago, under Lion, and I really like it! I personally hope they continue to develop QC and what we are experiencing is only a short lul as Apple switches gears in some other areas of their company. I would really like to see QC turn into a viable dev tool, one that can actually produce fully working stand-alone Apps. I'm not a coder, in fact it makes no sense to me, I can only understand a bit of basic scripting but QC's patch based editor does make sense to me, enough sense that I was able to actually use it for real production work. I developed a full live graphics system for our Graduation Ceremonies at the College I work for. The system had a live 1080p camera feed with overlay graphics and name keys designed for the various parts of the ceremonies. I was able to integrate an awesome custom patch (thanks Dieter Wimberger) that allowed me to automate the graphic creation of name keys for over 500 students as they crossed the stage. I was also able to control the entire system wirelessly using the Luminair ArtNet controller app on my iPad. This was all projected live onto a 14' wide 32:9 screen. I couldn't have developed a system to do that in any other software package I know of.

I think QC is a great tool and the best way we can show Apple it's a great product that should be continually developed is be coming up with new and innovative ways that it can be used. They aren't going to continue to develop a product that no one cares about or uses, if we want it to stay let's show them we care about it by coming up with great ways to use it, whatever condition it's currently in. :)

iason's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

regarding the mountain lion release: i just realized there is already a "graphics_tools_for_xcode_developer_preview_os_x_mountain_lion" available at the apple developer center. its free to download, you dont need a paid membership and it runs on lion. but as far as i can see there are no changes. still version 4.6 / Framework Version 5.0 maybe next time...

cybero's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

Actually you do need a paid membership to access the preview graphics tools. If you know you're getting such access without paid membership, you're being lucky. It could be that the you're accessing this via the Xcode menu which would indicate an ML install , I wonder if such an update would be available atop of the first Xcode for ML Lion , which I would asume was installed when one had a paid membership. That said, perhaps there is some weakness of design to the Developer portal.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I'm 99% sure that if you have the latest Lion version of Xcode (without any of the graphics tools, instruments, etc.) and just update to Mountain Lion preview, your Xcode will still be there. Then, if you update via the menu, it still works.

I haven't tried this in the latest ML, but was using a Lion Developer install in ML Preview 1, so that worked.

cybero's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

My ML route was a clean install, but by and large impressed - QC in the ML Xcode is version 5, oh and with a currently lapsed developer subscription, I can't update [as I expected]. Did check it out though.

dust's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I don't see why the future of qc always looks so bleak to people. Sure there are bugs from update to update but that is not just a qc issue. Apple deprecates code all the time and those types of issues are just hoops developers have to jump through. Primarily the latest dev hoop is sandboxing your apps, which has been fairly transparent from my position but brings up some qc issues with accessing qc's repository and utilizing some of apples official protocols like visualizers and things like that that that are required to be loaded from the system folder etc.. It seems temporary entitlements can address these issues but in my opinion are still bugs.

Its not just qc like I said other frameworks have issues like these as well. For instance not being able to write a quicktime movie from qtKit in a sandboxed environment is a perfect example of technology apple created that doesn't work with new apple protocols. So these type of issues are not inherent to qc. I can see the point that it certainly seems like apple may abandon legacy frameworks like qtKit for new ones like AVfoundation. This forces developers to re-write working code in new frameworks that are just as buggy if not more buggy than the legacy components. Its a game developers just have to play.

What it really seems like is apple is now moving maybe to fast to implement new features to new os's that people don't really care about like sandboxing. This rapid implementation of new os features just happens to let somethings slip by the way side as far as making sure they work in the newer environments. Apple just expects its developers to adopt the new technology and may or may not fix broken things. Now when it comes to a new OS that is apples bread and butter as far as software is concerned. The operating system undoubtedly out sells all other software because well computer don't work without it. Releasing a new OS every year is good for sales for apple but sometimes makes things messy for developers.

To me it seems most broken things in qc get fixed and that tells me Apple isn't going to abandon qc any time soon. There isn't any clear better alternative for apple to switch to anyways. Quartz Composer is bundled in the Quartz Framework. Quartz itself is defiantly legacy but intrinsic to cocoa. Quartz windowing and other cg calls deal with some pretty essential stuff like displaying things onscreen rendering things off screen opening a pdf saving an image etc.. If anything I see in the possible near future quartz being bundled into the quartz core frameworks and working on all devices. Quartz composer also being included in the framework bundle.

Quartz Composer is used by apple to make there applications like iMovie for instance. iMovie helps sell macs therefore iMovie isn't going away anytime soon so QC isn't going anywhere anytime soon. So I don't think there is a need for anybody to worry about QC going away. Now how apple rates the importance of fixing QC bugs is a different story but like I said that is not an issue inherent to just QC.

Hey Im all for an open sourced version of QC don't get me wrong. I just don't think the future is bleak for QC. Using QC on the web may seem pretty bleak at the moment though.

mpjstuff's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I don't have ANY substantiated claims, but sometimes I'm a freakishly good guesser;

Perhaps the reason we haven't seen much with Quartz -- and let's be honest -- QuickTime and some other important GPU intensive IDE's is because it is not EASY to accelerate or get to work on iOS. iOS has the priority -- but I think what gets the priority "be extension" on Mac OS are things that function on both platforms.

We've seen major boosts in JavaScript, HTML 5 and CSS 3. While platforms like Java is almost a readheaded stepchild. Interpreted languages get almost the same treatment.

If it runs on both -- it's improving.

So is Apple going to create an "flash like" replacement based on open standards like the web? It's a good chance. They certainly didn't seem too focused though creating about 5 different "document + web multimedia" publishing standards for Ads, Books, iTunes and whatnot. But perhaps some of that was part of a larger process and they felt they had to "feed the hype" and throw out things like iAd or bookstore just to give the wolves something to chew on.

But Apple desperately needs a GPU development environment like Quartz Composer. It doesn't like supporting interpreted languages either. If there is a future to Quartz -- in my OPINION it hinges on creating some sort of useful abstraction that makes it both run on an iPad as well as a Mac.

PREDICTION: In about another 18 months, Apple will pull the wraps off of a "combined OS" that pulls features from both (with more coming from iOS to Mac than vise versa), and with the option on the Desktop for more FileIO (file management separates out better as a distinct category). There will be a future "Quartz Composer LIKE" IDE at that time released -- though it's likely that projects would need a lot of conversion and possibly a totally different interface to access.

Apple has had a practice for sometime now with "go big or go home" -- it will either be killed off as a legacy dead end, or they will try to make something best of class (I suppose that comes as no shock to anyone here). Like Widgets and iAD Producer however -- Quartz Composer seems like a no-brainer for the future of MacOS / iOS development. It hasn't seen attention for some time because it's quite a niche and not the low hanging fruit like HTML and JavaScript (having an impact on a large group). But the open standards are not GPU accelerated. Could there be a larger app that includes interactivity, page layout and logic based on the open standards, with calls to the GPU for the intensive effects and image processing -- and perhaps rolling in a QuickTIme interactive component for video? Well that would certainly fit the "go big or go home" philosophy.

Apple would only create such a super cool environment if it wanted iOS development to put every other solution to shame. I can't expect others to be as smart as me -- so who knows? ;-)

iason's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

cybero wrote:
Actually you do need a paid membership to access the preview graphics tools. If you know you're getting such access without paid membership, you're being lucky...

you are right, my fault. i forgot that i was still logged in with a paid IOS Developer Account.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I think one of the strengths of QC, aside from looking at it like a "GPU" tool, is that it's possible to write bits of Cocoa code that have nothing to do with graphics, may run entirely in CPU, and use them modularly.

Another thing that seems really powerful about it, as opposed to Core Animation, is that it has greater control of 3D objects in 3D space - with something like the Kineme depth sort layer built into the framework, it would make it a more useful tool.

I think that the approach of having arbitrary shapes be renderers, etc., is probably flawed. It never seemed like chains should wind up with something like a sphere, but that a sphere should be dictated by structure of some sort, and then plug into something that ends/starts the chain. Kind of like QCMesh, but without sucking I guess. Replacements could be whipped up as virtual patches.

All of those QC patches like Sphere, Sprite, etc., are fixed function GL, and would need to be re-interpreted into a Core Profile approach going forward, and the structure pipeline needs to be improved. I do still like the idea of QC manipulating OpenGL stuff, as opposed to diving deeper... I think?

On a different note, here are two "fun" projects that are using some QC type approaches and are opensource:

Threenode.js : http://www.idflood.com/node/40

This is pretty cool, and it's interesting to be able to broadcast out the image on a network. More of a VVVV clone than anything - which makes it pretty similar to QC.

ofxComposer: https://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/ofxComposer

This is based around piping around video into fragment shaders at this point, but has some very interesting features like being able to setup quad warping and masking right in the Editor. It's in development and very alpha right now.

cybero's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

The convergence of iOS and OSX continues apace with the manner of that convergence allowing , in theory, for less of the gnarlies and apparent oversights that seem to have resulted from Apple's understandable focus upon the increasingly profitable and expanding iDevice line. Both iOS and OS X are now on an annual release schedule that is broadly concurrent.

In another twelve months we should, in theory, see improved synchronisation between hardware and software development, with OS facilities supported on purely 64 bit hardware with OS X both and iOS being concurrently and consistently up to date. We could see a real reduction in bugs in OS X being unaddressed.

Frameworks are due to change or have already been changed. QuickTime VDig API is being replaced by AV Foundation API, for instance. That still seems to be a work in progress.

I won't speculate much as to how far this convergence assures the future of QC.

It shouldn't harm it, unless Apple decides to replace QC's role in relation to other applications and application development. In which case, all our speculations are moot.

The future of QC looks bleak because we're all such miserable pessimists, at least I am •~.

Seriously though, I shall await the release of ML and then "suck it and see".

psonice's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I'm beginning to wonder if this 'convergence' won't last long before it becomes divergence.

My thinking here is simply this: we're definitely in the 'post PC' era, and the mac is basically just a PC. It won't last long, if that's the case - it'll be more convenient to do almost all the tasks we use the mac for on an idevice. There won't be much point in a mac any more for most people, so the market will effectively dry up. On the other hand there's always going to be a market for a mac for all the tasks you simply can't do on say an iPad. We can't really code on them, and there's plenty of 'power apps' that need a 'full' OS and custom hardware (like a high-end GPU) or access to peripherals.

If that's the way it goes, we'll end up with the consumer market on iOS and the pro market on the mac. The low-end computers will disappear and we'll be left with workstations and the macbook pro. The pro market will want a less iOS-like OS to create stuff in.

Then again, I'm not saying I'm not interested in a pro version of the iPad with a bigger screen, better hardware and a keyboard. I've already completely dropped the mouse in favour of trackpads :)

franz's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

a mouse ? what's that ?

usefuldesign.au's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

cwilms wrote:
I would really like to see QC turn into a viable dev tool, one that can actually produce fully working stand-alone Apps.

Me too but haven't invested the time in Xcode and Interface Builder (now embedded in Lion Xcode) to wrap and bind my QC comps. I use Kineme's Quartz Builder and it gives you encrypted compositions and a separate composition thread (unlike QC Editor) for QC to run on. (I hope that's not an unsubstantiated claim ;-) ) Presently the inputs panel is similar to the one in the QC Editor and doesn't extend in either direction to the default size, which is probably the first point of irritation if you want to make your own app.

usefuldesign.au's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

I recently moved to QC 4.6 on Lion (from 10.5) and discovered the Patch/Note finder in the Editor taskbar. Hey a feature request from years back cool QC is going places for me ;-)

Pity Wacom support is worse than the buggy state it was in on Leopard and Stock Keyboard patch still has bugs when used with Kineme's Freeboard patch (modifier keys). I know cwright took that bug on but said the Keyboard path was too hard to fix (how about a re-write) I guess Apple has much more sexy work to do than fixing old QC patches that never worked with 3rd party QC patches.

Yet to get into OpenCL and Meshes but I still think the promise of QC as a system wide resource for hosting video + 3D objects in prosumer apps is tantalising in addition to the core duties it performs in Video Apps.

I was watching a recent WWDC video introducing Core Image Framework (to iOS developers it would seem) and the stock 99 core image filters Apple ported to ML got applause. I think it's worth keeping that in mind when considering the iOS/OS X roadmap. CI Filters are Tiger era and only just getting onto iOS so it's hardly surprising Apple hasn't released QC for iOS to date. Certainly QCs future development would seem to hinge on its iOS merits, but surely it's here to stay for Video Apps on OS X as legacy framework until something way better comes alone.

itsthejayj's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

Patch/Note finder !!!! Where the muthf*ck did that come from ! Did this come with 4.6?

Completely agree with most being said here, heres hoping for a QC iOS version soon. But as we're talking about QC not getting any love, it must be noted that the qc Framework gets a bump ever osx release and the editor was updated to 4.6 just a couple of months ago.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

As much as I have championed QC iOS, the more I've thought about it, some things (issues?) come to mind. I personally think this is all pie in the sky at this point (not trying to be a negative nelly, I just think we'd have it already if we were going to):

-Would this just be support for running files in an app context, or some kind of editing on iOS too? I think from an Apple perspective, editing a qtz or really, using any dev tools on iOS seems to not make too much sense. That said, there are some cool dev apps for developing shaders and doing other coding stuff on iOS.

-What would any apple departments use a QC iOS tech for? A bunch of iOS "simple apps" have more of "shift from page to page" organization that reminds me of using a HyperCard-esque type tool for easy production, maybe with some timeline stuff for transitions? While there are a number of apps I can imagine whipping up in QC that could currently run in iOS, I wonder if it, in and of itself is a full fledged solution or just one tool in a set.

-There is revolving talk about a QC IDE being an end all-be all app making solution. I've harped on that before... but I think that was before I realized it's strengths in doing what it currently does best - being a resource in a Cocoa app, and helping define some relationships and evaluation of objects. The modular/plugin thing is also very valuable for workflow (and was hobbled, imo, by the duplicate plugin API's).

-As much as I would personally LOVE it to be a concern @ Apple, I have a feeling that the thought of "designer with minimal coding experience makes app that does X" isn't necessarily something that curries a lot of love from computer engineers. I think there's a tendency to view that stuff as hacky, and many QC plugins and approaches as tremendously hacky. I also think that making "node code" a turing complete thing, making apps entirely in node code can be done and is nice in theory, but becomes as hard or harder to understand than cleanly "written" code at some point.

-The instant visual output and live compile of QC is a GREAT tech. That is something that I hope Apple expands on.

-QC needs Core Profile to continue existing and some kind of compatibility context. If it's going to be a tool for "scheduling" events, setting up layers, and manipulating GL, it needs to be able to support modern GL. Don't get me wrong - plenty can be done with fixed function, but it is not the future.

As far as the note about CI on iOS - it's really slow and generally lacking (and is on desktop too). I'm not saying that to rag on it (too much), it's just a wonder to me that this tech continues to get all the love it does @ Apple, along with Core Animation, which is useful, but also not all it's cracked up to be at all. I feel like there is some serious kool aid drinking with those two technologies, and I'd love to see them get improved to a point where they perform decently.

cybero's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

Although there's been convergence of certain design features and HCI metaphors, the absence of a touchscreen iMac or MacBook, the need to accomodate higher CPU requirements or lower hardware capabilities and the different end user services means that the convergence will inevitably be differentiated as needed and judged appropriate between different form factors. Unless something were to ever come of ARM powered MacPros there would still need to be iOS and OS X for different chipsets, CPUs and AP.

The main feature that all Apple OS powered devices shall share is a more regular, sustainable and scaleable development road map.

leon's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

franz wrote:
a mouse ? what's that ?
-> That what was flat-beaten in rage, to become a Trackpad. (Sorry for the spam)

After reading the discussion, nothing seems clearer to me… Hope, it will be continued for a good time. Thinking now of buying a new MacBookPro- mainly aimed to work with Quartz, but don't know - a Retina or not? Will the Retina be better to work with Quartz, will it be fully supported?

leon's picture
Re: Future of Quartz Composer

Well, there has been silence for quite a while. Just can say: Mavericks and Retina supported so far. Lets have an eye on Quartz further development (I hope it really) and on VUO. But I see more the future in open source than in proprietary.... or better said, on free software. The community grows faster. And what is little money in one place is a lot in another part of the world.